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Months to live, but a longer wait for housing: Porter

Woman fighting rare cancer faces eviction, even though she was supposed to be pushed up on housing waiting list.

Lisa De Medeiros signed up for subsidized housing, and is supposed to get priority as she is terminally ill, but is still waiting. Her landlord has given her notice. (Andrew Francis Wallace / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

“By the time I get affordable housing, I’ll be dead,” says Lisa De Medeiros.

The 41-year-old mother of two has been fighting a rare form of abdominal cancer for nine years. Two Christmases ago, doctors gave her months to live.

A social worker at the hospital brought her a form to fill out for social housing, since she wouldn’t be able to navigate the stairs in her rental home.

In Toronto, people who are deemed terminally ill are pushed near the top of our social housing wait list.

On paper, it’s a parting gesture of kindness.

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In practice, only 145 got to move in last year, and De Medeiros was not one of them.

It’s not that Housing Connections, the caretakers of Toronto’s social housing wait list, is being particularly cruel to her. They are forced to be cruel to everyone. There are 95,000 households waiting for subsidized housing in Toronto. The city has only 70,000 units of rent-geared-to-income. Most of those units are ancient. Sure, cranes have sprouted like Starbucks across the city these past five years, but they have built only 2,848 new affordable rental units.

“They’re all for luxury condos,” says De Medeiros, angrily.

She’s right to be angry. It’s a travesty, and why I’m glad Kenneth Hale and Mike Creek flew to Geneva this week to demand the United Nations step in and, at the very least, shame Prime Minister Justin Trudeau into keeping his election promise and launch a national housing strategy.

In Holland, one-third of homes are subsidized. In England, 17 per cent are. In Canada? Five per cent.

Behind that pathetic statistic are hundreds of thousands of sad stories like that of De Medeiros.

Before she was diagnosed with inflammatory fibrosarcoma, De Medeiros had her whole life ahead of her. She was a dental assistant, married and pregnant with her second child. During an ultrasound, doctors discovered a tumour in her abdomen. Since then, De Medeiros has been on and off dozens of rounds of chemotherapy, hospitalized four times for emergencies, and had two surgeries to remove or drain her tumours. During that time, she and her husband split up, and she has not been able to go back to work.

Her little family of three survives on Ontario Disability cheques, which brings me to the second cold, miserable statistic: the amount the government gives a single parent with two children for shelter under Ontario Disability is $816. Can you imagine the state of a sizable apartment in this city that would rent for that price?

Right now, De Medeiros pays $1,500 for a two-bedroom place in the west end. Her daughter, almost 18 now, sleeps in the dining room. De Medeiros currently lives off less than $3,000 a month (minus rent), mainly from government benefits, though that will decrease when her daughter turns 18.

Here’s the kicker: their landlord gave them written notice last December. He needs their apartment himself, for personal reasons.

De Medeiros has spent the last two months scouring websites like Kijiji and Viewit.

“You can’t find a three-bedroom place in this city for less than $2,000,” she says. Clearly, she can’t afford that.

“I have to feed my kids …”

For the past two months, De Medeiros’s mother, Doris Riker, has launched a letter campaign, beseeching everyone from the mayor’s office to her MPP for help. So far, none has materialized because in truth, helping De Medeiros would mean hurting someone else whose story is equally heartbreaking, and whose wait has been even longer.

The changes needed are sweeping.

Riker does make one interesting point in her letter campaign. “If they can help find all these Syrian refugees find affordable apartments, why can’t they help my daughter find one?”

According to Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario lawyer Tracy Heffernan, many Torontonians, privately working to settle newly arrived refugees, are calling her agency. They are appalled at the rates and states of rental apartments in this city. Few of them have had to live on welfare themselves.

If they start demanding that more social housing go up across this country, perhaps Trudeau will listen.

For De Medeiros, any improvement will be too late, she says. But her fight is now larger than herself.

“Why don’t they put any effort into fixing this system? I’m not unique,” she says. “I want them to change the policy.”

Her landlord has agreed to let her stay 10 extra days, until March 10. Then, she will be homeless.

BY THE NUMBERS

Number of households on the Housing Connections waitlist: 95,280

Average wait for a two-bedroom subsidized apartment in Toronto: 8.5 years

Average wait for a victim of domestic abuse or terminally ill person for two-bedroom subsidized apartment: 0.75 years

Number of affordable housing units built in Toronto over the past five years: 2,848

Number of affordable housing units built in Ontario over the past 10 years: 18,030

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